June 11, 2008

Condi Rice: Back to the Future
Posted by Patrick Barry

You know we’ve hit the fever pitch of Bush Administration legacy
salvaging when Condoleezza Rice has a piece
in Foreign Affairs. Rice takes the Marty McFly approach, looking back to
her original assessment during the 2000
Presidential Campaign, Rice surveys 8 years of Bush Administration policy –
policy which she played a principal role in formulating - and big surprise, she
has a lot of trouble putting their record in favorable terms. Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter whether
its 2000 or 2008, if you try to square Rice’s analysis with the state of the
world today, you end up with a catalog of faulty recommendations and squandered
opportunities.

“to renew strong and intimate relationships with allies who share
American values and can thus share the burden of promoting peace, prosperity,
and freedom;”

Here she is in 2008, looking fondly back:

“I believe that one of the most compelling stories of our time is our
relationship with our oldest allies.”

And

“If someone had said in 2000 that
NATO today would be rooting out terrorists in Kandahar, training the security
forces of a free Iraq, providing critical support to peacekeepers in Darfur,
and moving forward on missile defenses, hopefully in partnership with Russia,
who would have believed him?”

Sadly, as far as our relationships go, the Bush Administration’s record
under Rice’s tutelage has been abysmal. In
Europe, opinion of the U.S. has
never been lower, and administration officials and their minions
have been happy to pour salt on the wounds. On the subject of NATO, the Administration’s lapses in Afghanistan and
the consigning of the mission to “do
what we can” status have given rise to perceptions that the historic alliance
is “divided”
or “unwieldy.” Those aren’t results we can believe in.

But let’s not stop there. Rice’s
understanding of the military is just as alarming. It’s not a surprise that Cheney and Rumsfeld bulldozed Rice when she was National Security adviser,
because she doesn’t have the foggiest idea what she’s talking about. Take a look:

“Thus the next president should refocus the Pentagon's priorities on
building the military of the 21st century rather than continuing to build on
the structure of the Cold War…In order to do this, Washington must reallocate
resources, perhaps in some cases skipping a generation of technology to make
leaps rather than incremental improvements in its forces. “

Sound familiar? That’s because she’s echoing Don Rumsfeld’s plan on
military restructuring, a plan so addle-minded
that even Fred
Kagan thought it was nuts. Faced
with U.S. forces that have stretched themselves beyond comprehension for
horrendously bad Bush Administration policies, this is the best Rice can offer
up:

“The experience of recent years has tested our armed forces, but it has
also prepared a new generation of military leaders…”

However, there is one area where Rice’s analysis holds up, where her
words still have relevance for how the U.S. relates to the world, and more
specifically, Iraq. In 2000, Rice wrote:

“Military force is best used to support
clear political goals, whether limited, such as expelling Saddam from
Kuwait, or comprehensive, such as demanding the unconditional surrender of
Japan and Germany during World War II. It is one thing to have a limited
political goal and to fight decisively for it;it is quite another to apply military force incrementally, hoping to
find a political solution somewhere along the way. A president entering
these situations must ask whether decisive force is possible and is likely to
be effective and must know how and when
to get out.”

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Comments

What Condi Rice fails to realize that who is going to pay for her gradiose foreign policy schemes? The United States finds itself in ever deeper debt and it is unrealistic to expect the Europeans and the Japanese to pay for a neo-conservative foreign policy.

Great piece.
If someone had said in 2000 that the US would be bogged down in expensive and losing military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the former defending a new Islamic Republic allied with Iran and in the latter dragging our NATO allies with us in that sinkhole of foreign armies, while creating universal bad will, and fostering bad relations with Russia and China, who would have believed him?
The worst POTUS ever and the worst SecState ever -- a match made in hell.

Well, if anyone knows "vacuous and posturing" it is McCain. Those words describe him perfectly. The Europeans were right to refuse to help in the invasion of Iraq. Too bad more "politicians" in this country did not take a stronger stand against Cheney/Bush. The country would not be in the mess we are in now.

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